[caption id=”attachment_78242″ align=”aligncenter” width=”512″] AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda
[/caption]
… Well, no democracy, that is.
Norway withdrew its Oslo bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games on Wednesday after the Norweigian government decided the estimated $5.4 billion cost just wasn’t worth it, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan as potential host cities.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) called Oslo’s withdrawal a missed opportunity “for all the people of Norway who are known worldwide for being huge fans of winter sports” and “a missed opportunity for the outstanding Norwegian athletes who will not be able to reach new Olympic heights in their home country.”
In addition to the impossibly high cost of building new athletic infrastructure with little, if any, economic return after the two-weeks of Olympic games, the IOC has a list of demands that may be more fitting for authoritarian regimes to accommodate anyway.
According to the IOC manuals, as reported by Business Insider:
2. The hotel must have a members lounge to be used exclusively by IOC members. If there is no members lounge, the hotel has to install one at its own cost.
3. During the Opening Ceremony, doves must be released after the parade of athletes but before the head of the IOC speaks.
4. IOC members must be greeted by “smiling, positive, and welcoming staff” at the airport.
5. IOC meeting rooms must be air-conditioned to 68 degrees.
6. Signs around the city telling people where to go should be in sans-serif font and “be conceived as part of the Look” of the Games.
These little perks, and the business of building sports arenas a country doesn’t need, can get expensive. For the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia spent a ludicrous $51 billion, the most expensive in Olympic history.
It seems that only oil-rich Kazakhstan, governed by a president-for-life, and China—which is, well, China—are willing to shell out the cost of the Games. Actually, Norway is just the latest in a string of democratic countries to pull their bid.
In January, Sweden dropped out when the government declined to pay for the necessary facilities to accommodate sports like the bobsleigh and luge, saying, “There isn’t any need for that type of that kind of facility after an Olympics.” Krakow, Poland withdrew its bid in May after 70 percent of voters in a citywide referendum came out against hosting the Olympics.
Voters in Munich, Germany and Davos/St. Moritz, Switzerland also definitively rejected the chaos and expense that descends upon an Olympic host city. And Lviv, Ukraine pulled out over concerns of national turmoil.
That leaves the IOC, which will vote for the host city on July 31, 2015, two swell options for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Considering corrupt governments love wastefulness and grandstanding, 2022 promises to be quite a show.
